Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent Design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today we're sharing a recent conversation with Dr. Casey Luskin from the Truthful Hope podcast.
Casey critiques theistic evolution, the view that God used evolutionary mechanisms to to create life.
The conversation kicks off with some clarity over terms including what is meant by the word evolution.
The theistic evolution perspective, also sometimes called evolutionary creation, accepts the official scientific evolutionary account, the same view held by atheists, and simply adds the theological claim, but this is how God did it.
Critically, these proponents reject the idea that design can be empirically or scientifically detected in nature.
The central scientific problem Luskin highlights, of course, is that the theistic evolution view inherits all the numerous scientific problems associated with the standard evolutionary account.
The conversation then pivots to explore the most significant of these problems, the origin of life or chemical evolution.
Dr. Luskin outlines several fundamental barriers to explaining how inanimate matter could transition into self replicating living cells.
Luskin argues that the more scientists learn about the complexity of life and conduct origin of life experiments, the further away they get from finding a naturalistic solution.
And that's bad news for those with a theistic evolution perspective.
Let's join Dr. Luskin now with his host Jacob Vasquez.
[00:01:46] Speaker C: I'm really excited for today's episode. We're going to be discussing an interesting, interesting view held by many self professing Christians such as Francis Collins called theistic evolution. And to avoid discarding their belief in Darwinian evolution altogether. This seems like something some Christians hold to in hopes of retaining their belief in God and with Darwin's theory. To help unpack this for us and show some of the serious flaws scientifically with theistic evolution, we have joining us now for the second time, the associate director of Discovery Institute, Dr. Casey Luskin. Casey, thank you so much for jumping on again.
[00:02:24] Speaker A: Great to be back with you, Jacob.
[00:02:27] Speaker C: Yeah, well it's, you know, it's great to have you back on and in 2012 you wrote what I found to be a really interesting article called Deity Added. I know that was a long time ago as we were talking about before this recording, but I think you did a great job of simply critiquing theistic evolution scientifically, so I'd love to unpack that further with you.
You also more recently contributed to a pretty massive work here. I have it called Theistic Evolution for our readers. It's a really helpful tool and it is not, it's not the shortest read. So if you're a reader, you'll love it.
[00:03:02] Speaker A: It makes a great doorstop or, you know, self home defense weapon. In the middle of the night, if somebody's coming at you, you can bash them over the head with it.
[00:03:10] Speaker C: That's right. It's kind of like the on the Resurrection series by Gary Habermas. I usually tell people, if anyone says there's no evidence on the Resurrect Resurrection, there's a thousand pages. If anyone says there's no critique on theistic evolution, here's about the same amount.
But you did two chapters, you contributed two chapters, one on common descent and another on the missing transitions in the fossil record. So you've done your research in this, you're familiar with it. So I'm really excited to just break it open and, and clarify really theistic evolution and if it stands to be true.
So let's just start at the top. What is theistic evolution?
[00:03:47] Speaker A: Sure. So theistic evolution is basically the view that God used evolutionary mechanisms to create life.
And as we get into this, I want to make it really clear, Jacob, that I am not questioning the Christian commitment of folks who hold to a theistic evolution view. I'm not here to say that they're not Christians. I'm a Christian, you're a Christian. I'm not at all saying that they're not Christians.
But I do believe that theistic evolution view has a lot of problems.
Scientific problems, philosophical, logical problems, and theological problems. So I disagree with them. But I'm not here to, you know, bash anybody's personal Christian faith commitment, those sort of things. Yeah, that's helpful. So theistic evolution, very simply, is the view that God used evolutionary mechanisms to create life. And you know, the first thing I ask when somebody tells me is that they are atheistic evolutionists is, well, what do you mean by evolution?
And I think we talked about this last time. But there are sort of three broad standard definitions of understanding the word evolution. It can mean something as simple as change over time within a species, something a little bit more, you know, much, much more evolutionary, like the common ancestry of all living organisms. Or you can take the standard evolutionary view that blind and apparently unguided mechanisms like natural selection, random mutation, genetic drift, et cetera, that those are responsible for generating the diversity and complexity of life.
And so if somebody says they're atheistic evolutionists, I want to ask them, what exactly do you mean when you say you believe in evolution? Because depending upon what they say, they mean their view actually might be much closer to intelligent design or it Might be pretty much just the standard Darwinian evolutionary view. We can, we can dig down into what that means.
[00:05:34] Speaker C: Yeah, that's really helpful to clarify and it's good to rehash kind of what evolution is from what we talked about last. And for our listeners who have been tuning in regularly, you probably realize the theme of asking questions. And we always talk about, you know, asking questions in your apologetics because you don't want to assume somebody's view and you'd rather really get a clear cut answer or insight into what they truly believe. So that's a great way to start. When they say they're theistic evolutionists, you say, what do you mean by theistic evolution? And that should open up the, the conversation more. So that's really helpful.
But in your article you started with origin of life and I really like that because origin of life is a really interesting field. To me. It seems as if a lot of evolutionists, maybe not all, either purposefully or not, avoid this as much as possible because it seems like a very difficult topic on their view.
Maybe just unpack origin of life and some of the limitations given evolution for theistic evolution and Darwinian, but specifically theistic evolution.
[00:06:38] Speaker A: Yeah, so first of all, I do want to talk about the different definitions of evolution. Then we can talk about the origin of life. Because if someone just says, look, I believe God used evolution and all they mean is change over time within species, or, you know, we can see that there's, you know, maybe all, all cats are related, sort of like small, small scale change or change within lower taxonomic categories, then I'm going to say, okay, yeah, I mean, pretty much everybody I know, including all the Darwin skeptics that are out there, accepts change over time within species or even, you know, limited change within groups. And so if you are a theistic evolutionist in that sense, that's not really a very informative, you know, term to use to describe yourself because, you know, you might be intelligent design theorist, you might be a, you know, more along the lines of a standard evolutionary biology perspective, what you might call Neo Darwinism or something, some flavor along those lines. So where do you really land? It's hard, it's hard to say. If somebody then says, well, I believe in the common ancestry of all living organisms, well, that is a lot more informative or even like say human chimp common ancestry. And they believe, you know, that somehow God guided that. Okay, now you're getting into more of just a standard evolutionary view. But even that view of common ancestry, if you believe it was guided by God. There are quite a few people historically who would have believed in common ancestry, but actually were supporters of intelligent design. They rejected sort of the view that the evolutionary process happens on its own and that it doesn't need any, you know, involvement from an intelligent agent. Somebody like Alfred Russel Wallace, who was not a Christian, but he was a sort of a, he was not a materialist either. He believed in some kind of a, an immaterial realm and he believed he was the co discoverer of natural selection alongside of Charles Darwin. But he later believed that the evolutionary process, at least, you know, what led to human beings, had to be guided by some intelligent force or some intelligent agent. So he was an, a design theorist, basically an intelligent design proponent. And so, you know, he would not be a standard evolutionary theorist who says it's just blind evolutionary mechanisms all the way down. But so, so, you know, you have to ask people, what do you believe?
You do find folks out there who accept, fully accept the standard evolutionary story, you know, folks like I would say Francis Collins, who fully accept the standard evolutionary account of how life arose and diversified. And yet they believe this is how God did it. Okay, so when we think of theistic evolutionists, this would be sort of the, the full throated official version of theistic evolution. These are folks who would reject intelligent design at least as far as the claim that we can scientifically and empirically detect design in nature. They think that when we look at the world scientifically, all we see are standard evolutionary mechanisms all the way down to the beginning of life. And so they basically take the official evolutionary view that the scientific community believes, that every atheist believes, and they just say, well, but this is how God did it. Okay, so let's just be very clear that this is sort of just when you talk about folks. Most of the folks who would affiliate with mainstream theistic evolution groups like BioLogos, like the Faraday Institute, they sometimes will call themselves evolutionary creationists. That's fine if that's what they want to be called. But this is the view that they take, that it's standard evolutionary mechanisms, really, no divergence whatsoever from what mainstream evolutionary biology teaches, from what every atheist believes about how life got started. Except they would say, and this is how God did it. Okay, so they don't believe you can see God empirically speaking, in that process, but they do have faith that this is how God the mechanisms that God used to create life on earth. So if this is the view that they're taking, then sort of, you know, in my view, the biggest problem with that view is, is that scientifically that standard evolutionary account of how life arose, that's chemical evolution and then diversified, that's biological evolution. That standard evolutionary account has numerous scientific problems. And so to the extent that the, you know, the evolutionary explanations for how life arose and then how life diversified, you know, those sort of different questions, the origin of life and the evolution of life. But to the extent that those views have scientific problems, so does theistic evolution. When you, when that's the version, the standard full throated theistic evolution version, if that's what they're adopting, then it has all those scientific problems as well.
Right.
[00:11:04] Speaker C: And that's super helpful. And I think that's where the questions come in. Right. Because you get to clarify what they really mean. And sometimes they might subscribe to more of an intelligent design position and you might be able to tell them, hey, that's actually intelligent Design. That's not really the, the strict theistic evolution theory, which is.
[00:11:21] Speaker A: Oh, sorry, go ahead.
[00:11:23] Speaker C: Yeah, no, no, go ahead.
[00:11:25] Speaker A: No, I mean I've totally met folks who, you know, I started talking to them and said, oh yeah, I'm a theistic evolutionist. I believe God guided the evolutionary process. And then when you drill down to what they mean, they are actually a supporter of intelligent design because they believe that God guided it in a meaningful way where we can actually see that, oh, they will say, I don't believe that random mutation and natural selection can build these complex features. I believe that God somehow had to have guided the evolutionary process. And you can see God's hand in the evolutionary process, empirically speaking. If that's where they're coming from, then they are more of an intelligent design theorist than a theistic evolutionist. But of course, you know, these are all just terms we use. We have to really drill down to what people mean. But yeah, I know a lot of folks out there who, they're sort of their ID proponents and they don't realize it yet.
[00:12:13] Speaker C: Right, right.
Well that, that, that's so good. And yeah, we, we have to ask our questions, we have to clarify for their sake as well as ours. It's a win, win for both parties.
But with that said, maybe break open Origin of life. And I know you know the topics, origin of life especially is a deep one. So maybe briefly, just give a few limitations that evolutionists run into for our listeners today.
[00:12:38] Speaker A: Briefly. Well, I just gave an hour long lecture on this about two weeks ago for a class that I'm teaching. So I mean, I've got a Lot of material to talk about. But the origin of life is supposed to explain how you went from basically inanimate matter to living cells that could self replicate on the early Earth. And there's a number of steps that origin of life theorists will claim that had to have taken place in order for this to happen. It kind of starts with basically raw materials and very primitive short, tiny little molecules on the early Earth which then experienced energetic interactions, which then led to more complex molecules like monomers, which led to more complex molecules like polymers, which then led to things like RNA or proteins or maybe even DNA, which eventually led to basically living cells as we know them.
And there's problems all throughout each of those steps in the Origin of Life. The first problem is that you got to explain how you sort of took those raw materials on the early Earth and formed prebiotic monomers. And one of the main famous experiments that cited is the Miller Urey experiment, where they will claim this was done back in the 1950s, that they took gases that were supposed to represent gases that were present on the early Earth. This we're talking about like hydrogen, ammonia, methane. They zapped those gases with electricity that's supposed to simulate lightning striking the atmosphere in the early Earth. And lo and behold, they created some amino acids. Okay, so give credit where credit is due. Amino acids, of course, are a very far cry from life, but at least they did that. Well, it turns out that the gases that they used in those experiments are no longer thought to have been present by geochemists on the early Earth. The early Earth's atmosphere is now thought to have been more dominated by carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, some water vapor as well, which could possibly have dissociated into oxygen, also some hydrogen, but not to the extent that would create a reducing atmosphere that's necessary to produce get these Miller Urey type experiments to work. So basically they really don't have a good mechanism for generating some of the pre, simple prebiotic monomers on the early Earth. Now a few years ago, I'd say In the last 10 or 15 years, they made some progress generating nucleotides, again, a type of monomer that would be necessary as a stepping stone to creating, to generating rna.
And they claim to have done this using sort of primitive Earth like conditions.
Jim Tor, who's a professor of chemistry at Rice University, has done a fantastic job critiquing some of these chemistry experiments which are said to produce things like prebiotic monomers. And he talks about the fact that basically when they do these experiments, they will start by Buying large quantities of pure materials to start with, okay? To start off these reactions, large quantities of pure reactants that would never have been present on the early Earth. And then he talks about the fact that as they do these chemistry experiments, you know, many, many steps have to be done in these synthesis experiments to produce a nucleotide. And in each step, the product that you produce is a very, very tiny amount. Now, in the, in the primitive Earth, where you don't have a chemistry can, like, you know, orchestrate these experiments and these, each of these steps in these synthesis reactions, in the real world, you're not going to be able to start off with a large amount of pure reactant. At the beginning, you're going to have only a tiny bit because each step yields only a teeny tiny amount of product. And in the real world, you would have to then start the next step in the reaction with that tiny amount of product. And the problem is what Jim Tour calls the mass transfer problem. After multiple steps of getting teeny tiny amounts of product at the end of each reaction, you're going to run out of material for future steps and you're going to just have nothing left.
And so that's another major problem. So again, how do they get around this? Well, essentially, they do what any chemist does. They buy large amounts of reactants and they just start off the next step in the reaction series with large amounts of pure materials. That would never happen on the early Earth. And these materials, these organic molecules, often have very short half lives. That means that if it is too warm, basically, then you will degrade these molecules so quickly they won't be around to be able to react in the next step. But if it's too cold, yes, you can then preserve some of these molecules. You can make the half life of these molecules last longer, but in a cold environment, you no longer have these molecules undergoing chemical reactions. So heat in these situations is kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don't. Too much heat, you destroy the chemicals you're working with. Not enough heat, you don't have enough energy, and you actually don't power these reactions to go forward. But let's just say, hypothetically that you could somehow produce all these prebiotic monomers on the early Earth, things like amino acids, nucleotides, et cetera. Well, the next thing you gotta do is you gotta link them up to form polymers. This is called polymerization.
The problem with polymerization is that polymerization reactions, yes, they can link up two monomers into a polymer, but they also generate A water molecule and the famous environment that they want. All of these chemical reactions where life supposedly evolved, taking place is called what, the primordial soup. It's a water based environment. And in a water based environment, what happens, you don't form polymers. You break polymers apart because of Le Chatelier's principle, you're going to drive the polymerization backwards because reactions do not like to go forward in the presence of their product. So in the presence of a water molecule, the polymerization reaction is driven backwards. You break the polymers up and you don't actually get polymers. So the last place that you would want to have polymerization, which is a crucial step in the origin of life, you got to have a way to take these monomers, link them up to form larger molecules like proteins, rna, maybe even DNA or whatever. You've got to have long polymers in order to get life started. And the last place you would want to do that is in a primordial soup type environment or underwater near a hydrothermal vent, which is another favorite location potentially for the origin of life. They like hydrothermal vents because there's a lot of interesting chemicals there. There's a lot of energy from these undersea hydrothermal vents. But you're trying to do it underwater. And they're also very hot environments where again, the heat is going to destroy the organic molecules that you're trying to produce. But let's say that somehow you could produce all these necessary, necessary polymers. The next step in the origin of life is what we call clumping. You've got to get all of these polymers together in a sort of a small compartment encapsulated environment, something like what we have today, where cells use a cell membrane and inside of that environment, then they can have nice little protected space to have reactions and get life going. There have been some experiments that have produced things that folks have said could be primitive cell membranes. They call them protein microspheres, or proposed, they call them coacervates. There's a problem. All of these hypothetical primitive cell membranes, they don't do what cell membranes do in the real world of living organisms today. Number one, they don't metabolize, they don't grow. They the way that, you know, cell membranes can grow. But number two, cell membranes and living organisms, they are these smart barriers. There are all kinds of molecular machines and carbohydrates and sugars embedded in the membranes of living cells. And what those machines and those, those molecules do is they keep harmful molecules out and they let helpful nutrients in. Okay? And if you don't have a smart membrane if you just have this sort of passive, you know, little whatever you want to call it, some kind of protective membrane. It's never going to do the job to keep harmful molecules out and let helpful molecules in. And in order to get a cell membrane that actually does this very basic protective function that every cell membrane needs to do, you need molecular machines. And you're never going to have those prior to the origin of life. You're never going to have all these complex carbohydrates that cells put on the surface of their cell membranes to perform these functions. I'm sorry, it's just not going to happen. So I think there's a real problem with getting a cell membrane that can perform the basic functions of cell membranes today. Now, when I was an undergraduate at UC San Diego, I actually took an origin of life seminar that was taught by Stanley Miller. He was a professor at UC San Diego in those days. And I remember very clearly, I wrote down in my notes, he said this quote, he said, making compounds and making life are two different things. So, so it's one thing to get, you know, a bunch of molecules, even if you can get these polymers, rna, proteins, whatever, but it's very different thing to produce life.
And according to origin of life theorists, the first life would have been something like a self replicating molecule. They would prefer it to be an RNA molecule. It's simpler than DNA. They think that RNA can both carry information, kind of like DNA does, and it can also catalyze reactions in some cases at least kind of like proteins does. So maybe rna. The RNA world hypothesis proposes RNA as the first self replicating molecule, the first form of life, which can hopefully perform both the information carrying function of life and the reaction catalyzation function that proteins carry out. Today, many, many problems with the, with RNA world model number one. RNA has never been shown to assemble in the laboratory without the help of a skilled chemist intelligently guiding the process. Okay, so RNA just does not form. We are not aware of how to produce RNA under natural earth like conditions.
Another point has been pointed out by a very smart origin of life theorist named Steve Benner. Actually got to meet him at a conference a few years ago, and that is that life, RNA in particular needs a molecule that is inherently toxic, but to life and rna, and that's called water. Okay? Again, water destroys rna, it breaks down polymers, okay? And so you, it's, it's kind of like the last place you would want for RNA to form would be in some kind of an aqueous environment without all the enzymes and other molecules that life has to prevent that kind of degradation from, from happening so quickly. So the bottom line is that forming RNA in a prebiotic environment, there's no evidence that that can actually happen. There's also no evidence that RNA can perform a lot of the catal properties of proteins. One paper said that when it comes to RNA functioning as a catalyst, it's 1, you know, it's basically 1 million times less as good at doing catalyzing reactions as proteins would be. So it's really not good at that. But this is not even the fundamental problem with the RNA world. The fundamental problem is that they are proposing a self replicating RNA molecule. And theorists have proposed that this maybe needs to be about 200, 300 nucleotides in length.
So if you imagine trying to specify just by chance, let's say somehow you do produce an environment that is just generating all these RNA molecules. Well, to get a self replicating RNA molecule, you need to get a bunch of nucleotides in just the right order. Okay. And the only mechanism you have to do that is blind chance. Again, we're assuming some magical environment just produces lots of RNAs. What's the likelihood of getting the nucleotides in just the right order so that you get a self replicating rna? All of our attempts to do this in the lab, we can't even intelligently generate a self replicating RNA in the lab. So what's the likelihood this is going to happen by chance?
One theorist, Robert Shapiro, said that the sudden appearance of a large self copying molecule such as RNA was exceedingly improbable. And he says the probability is so vanishingly small that it's happening even once anywhere in the visible universe would count as an exceptional piece of good luck.
Steven Bennert raises a very interesting point. What he basically says is if you look at what origin of life theorists produce in these RNA world experiments is yes, they can produce RNAs that can do things. And the likelihood of producing an RNA that destroys other RNAs is much, much, much greater than producing an RNA that can basically make copies of itself. Okay, so we have sort of like a fundamental, I think, defeater right there of this idea that you could get an RNA self replicating RNA molecule by chance because you're much more likely to produce an RNA molecule That destroys other RNAs, not one that copies RNAs. That's just, we can see that in the experiments. So there's a real problem with The RNA world molecule right there or model right there.
So look, we could go on and on.
The bottom line is that I could give you boatloads of quotes from mainstream scientists saying that we just don't know how life arose. Okay, I'll give you a quote from Venki. I'm going to probably mispronounce this name, but it's Venki Ramakrishnan. He's former president of the World Society and a Nobel Prize winner. And he wrote a book called Gene Machine that came out in 2023, published by Basic Books. And here's what he said. He said, how life began is one of the great remaining mysteries of biology. The problem is that in nearly all forms of life, DNA carries genetic information. But DNA itself is inert and made by a large number of protein enzymes which require not only RNA but also the ribosome to make these enzymes. Moreover, the sugar and DNA, deoxyribose, is made from ribose by a large, complicated protein. Nobody can understand how the whole system could have got started every step of the way. Jacob, in the Origin of Life, you have fundamental chemical, logical, biological barriers.
And these problems are really nowhere near being solved by origin of life theorists. So I give them credit for trying, and I respect their faith that they will someday get it right, but I just don't see the evidence pointing in the direction. In fact, I love the way Jim Tour has framed this. What he says is that the more we learn about the complexity of life and the more we do origin of life experiments, we don't get closer to explaining the origin of life. We get further from it. And so the trend line of the data really is that the origin of life, we do not see a solution in sight. And you do see scientists frequently being honest and acknowledging that we don't have a solution to this problem, nor is one really forthcoming. So I think if you are a theistic evolutionist and you're. You're looking to explain the origin of life, you know, and you believe that there is an intelligent being out there that made the universe. Well, look no further. All right? What does life run on? Life runs on information. Okay? Information. The kind of information in the machine, like structures we see in life, they don't come about. We have no experience with those kinds of things coming about through natural mechanisms. Okay? Blind mechanisms don't produce the kind of information we see in life. The machines that we see in life. In our experience, those kinds of things only come about through intelligence. So if you already believe in some kind of a creator an intelligent, you know, supreme being, supreme God that created everything. Why would you want to go into a model, adopt a model for which there's really no evidence that it can produce the kind of complexity that we see in life. But you do believe in a cause that can produce that kind of complexity if you believe in God. So why would you want to adopt a theistic evolution view of the origin of life? I just don't understand why the evidence would lead you to that position.
I'm sorry, it just makes no sense to me. There has to be some other reason.
[00:28:22] Speaker C: Yeah, that is a great way to unpack origin of life. And you know, you mentioned Dr. James Tor in the book Theistic Evolution. He actually did a chapter called Our present proposals on Chemical Evolutionary Mechanisms accurately pointing toward first life. So right there you have about 30 pages of Dr. Tour going all into that.
It's funny too, because you're mentioning all these models and ways that, you know, scientists are trying to kickstart origin of life in, in every case. And you briefly mentioned this.
It's design.
They're showing that it requires design to kick off the first life. Really. So I see that more as affirmation than anything else for intelligent design, personally.
[00:29:04] Speaker A: No, I, look, I, I agree with you. I'm only, only one time did I hear of an experiment that I thought really accurately modeled the earlier. And they went to some of those like bubbling mud pots in like a Yellowstone type environment and they put a bunch of chemicals in there to see what would happen. All right. Of course nothing happened, but, you know, at least they were trying to use what they thought would look like an environment on the early Earth.
Other than that, the experiments that I'm aware of, they don't mimic natural earth like conditions. They really. And when you're not mimicking earth like conditions, you're showing that intelligent design is needed. And so I agree with what you just said very much. Yeah.
[00:29:40] Speaker B: That was Casey Luskin in the first half of a conversation critiquing theistic evolution on the Truthful Hope podcast with Jacob Vasquez. In a separate episode, the conversation continues as Cayce turns from the problems in the field of origin of life to the inadequacy of natural selection and random mutation to generate biological complexity.
These scientific problems undermine the credibility of the standard evolutionary account that's adopted by many theistic evolutionists.
So don't miss the conclusion to this conversation for ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for joining us.
[00:30:18] Speaker A: Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligentdesign.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
